... "' .. ... = .11 ,. I' ... :: .. nw , ' ........ -.Þ / .. .u. . 1/1// ' ;'-"V 'nl I } , \' i . mJ. /J'\\ \\ . " · 0 . 0 0 '"-,, "IÞ_ THE, TALK OF THE, TOWN Notes and Comment T HE 'odds ought to be eight hundred to one on Mr. Walker, not eight to one. It may be true that in the time he devotes to civic affairs he personally does little, beyond changing a police commissioner and handling such matters of broad policy, but his attitude toward accomplishment does not seem to be antagonistic and somebody, we know not who-the oJ borough presidents, or the bosses of Tammany, or the civil-service en- gineers in the Department of Plant and Structures, possibly-gets some things done, subways built, tunnels dug, streets cleaned, asphalt laid-not enough, Allah knows, but some. The city struggles on. Meantime Walker does things of infinitely greater im- portance. He lives. He is gay, care- free, obviously happy. He makes J( whoopee, stays up late, rises late. He dresses snappy and talks snappy. He dines with the BiddIes and is photo- graphed with Colleen Moore. Thus he has become the symbol of some odd million glamour-starved souls numbly seeking escape from reality. In im- portance he ranks ahead of Roxy's, Babe Ruth's home-run score, Ziegfeld's chorus, the tabloids, the Edison test, the Snooks case, or Lindbergh's or Rockefeller's private lives. He's five hundred years ahead of his time. Or maybe o ly one hundred, at the rate , . we re gOIng. ASIDE from a few scattered cases .n of nervous breakdown, we have not noticed that this mad age is any harder on people's constitutions than previous periods in the world's history. There are times, though, when one's mental balance is maintained only by reverting to the more soothing infl u- ences of a bygone day. This was the case with a man we know who became very fond of modern music-the George An theil variety , which is full of dissonances and racket of one sort and another. He spent hours studying it and listening to it. After a bit, he got sick. His physician, finding no pathological weakness, concluded that the modern music was getting him down. The doctor arranged that his patient should hear "Liebes- traum" and a few nice old love songs each day. The man's recovery was rapid. W E advocate a return to the old- fashioned letterhead. The mod- érn letterhead is too chaste, too re- strained, not interesting. The reason we happen to bring up this vexing sub- ject is because we've just received a letter from the Horlick's Malted Milk Corporation, of Racine, Wisconsin (the first we ever received from them, incidentally), and there, folks, is a letterhead! We spent fully ten min- utes in silent admiration of the scene- a pastoral, covering nearly half the page, depicting a sweet-faced dairy- maid fully two inches high, her right arm around the neck of a Horlick cow, her left arm holding a can of milk, all about her daisies-myriads of them- and in the background a rippling stream along whose bank four other cows and a calf are' grazing, while beyond are harvest fields full of ripe grain being gathered into sheaves; in a peaceful valley to the left are the laboratory buildings, smoke -curling from their stacks. Each daisy, mind you, as plain as the nose on your face; each cow as motherly as a cow can be and still stay in the picture. That's what we call a letterhead! The scene so fascinated us that (come to think of it) we never got around to reading the letter-which is an added argument in favor of going back to the old-fashioned letter head. AN authority tells us that soon (with- n. in eighteen months, he says optimistically) the airplane will be only :: o ten per cent pilot and ninety per cent airplane. At present it is ten per cent airplane and ninety per cent pilot; when the pilot does something foolish he and his passengers have scant chance of sur- viving. The future flying machine will be able to outwit a negligent or foolhardy pilot, at least long enough for somebody to overpower him and take the controls, says our authority. This cheers us up. We would ask one other improvement, and that is the sequestering of endurance fliers. All persons going up in the air for the pur- pose of staying two weeks or a month should be segregated so that they can-